Read Online The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time by Steven Sherrill - Free Book Online Page B

the joke. “Don’t be a besom,” she says, winking at the wife, then explains that besom means broom but can also mean disagreeable woman . “Don’t be a besom, always sweeping up dust.”
    Sometimes they laugh. This couple doesn’t. But before leaving the wife buys one of the broom maker’s little Guardian Angels, splintery talismans made of husk and straw and jute twine.
    “Won’t it look nice on the Christmas tree?” the wife says.
    The Guardian Angels always sell.
    “Hey, big boy,” the broom maker says when the coast is clear. “Bring those horns over here and put them to some good use.”
    The Minotaur isn’t sure what she wants.
    The broom maker sees his confusion. “Can you help me move the shave horse?”
    “Umm?” the Minotaur says. He heard her the first time but wants to hear those words again from her mouth: the shave horse . It’s a foot-operated vise.
    “I want to look out the window,” she says.
    The shave horse is heavy, its narrow bench made from a split log planed smooth.
    “I asked Biddle to help yesterday. Fucker came in and started telling me about a website called ‘Ass—”
    “Booooring,” a voice interrupts. The voice is followed by, drags in, perhaps, the head of a boy, eight, nine, ten years old. He pokes his noggin through the Broom Shack’s door, cocks his crisp new Rebel cap back on his head, and repeats his charge: “Booooring.”
    “Bender!” a mother shrieks. “Get over here!”
    The boy waggles an Indian spear—its rubber head flopping back and forth—at the Minotaur, then retreats.
    “—hole Worship, ’” the Broom Maker says. “‘Asshole Worship’?
    What the fuck?”
    You have to straddle the shave horse. To make it work. Straddle it.
    “‘Asshole Worship.’ Tried to show me pictures.”
    “Mmmnn.”
    “Of assholes! And—”
    “Bender!” the woman yells, somewhere out of sight. “Take that out of your mouth right now!”
    “Ready, set, go,” the broom maker says, and they lift together.
    “Unngh,” she says.
    “Unngh,” he says. The Minotaur had never noticed the broom maker’s freckles. He’s always noticed the splinters in her fingers and palms.
    “Yeah, baby,” she says after giving the shave horse one final shove. She pulls aside the burlap curtain and looks out. The Minotaur wonders what she sees. “You know what I think, M?”
    “Mmmnn?”
    “Men are stupid. That’s what I think.”
    The Minotaur agrees, mostly. Sometimes, in those rare moments of clarity, the Minotaur understands that people usually do the best they can in any given moment. But the standard, the bar, the broomstick over which people must jump, is low. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault.
    “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur lows. He laments.
    The broom maker’s face is dotted with freckles, nut brown against her pale flesh. She talks and talks and talks, and the freckles move. They swirl—oceanlike, constellation-like—over her cheeks. The Minotaur wants to look at that face. Wants more than anything, there in the Broom Shack, to find the monsters and the heroes (even the lesser beasts) among those stars. But you have to straddle the shave horse, so the broom maker does. Sits with her back to the Minotaur.
    “Hand me a stick,” she says.
    The Minotaur rattles around in a bin of cut birch saplings, does as he is told.
    “Sit yourself down,” she says. “All them horny horns make me nervous.”
    The only option is a low three-legged stool roughly crafted from a split tree trunk and some thick branches. The Minotaur does as he is told. The stool wobbles beneath him. The broom maker, astraddle the shave horse, presses the treadle with both feet, clamping the stick tight in the vise’s wooden jaws. She leans, stretches, reaches onto the workbench for her draw knife.
    “My mama always told me . . . ,” she says.
    The Minotaur doesn’t hear the advice. He’s too preoccupied with the broom maker’s movement.
    “Did your mama ever . . .